Last night, I got home after another fun and productive MDN documentation sprint; this one was held in Mozilla’s lovely Vancouver office. In addition to Mozilla’s paid writing staff and a few core contributors, we had Mounir Lamouri, a Mozilla platform engineer, on hand to offer technical expertise about web-based device APIs. In addition, two Vancouver-area residents, Aras and Amr, also joined us, making their first contributions to MDN!

Photo provided by Florian Scholz.

To top it all off, Vancouver-based content strategy expert Rahel Bailie dropped in to help us do a quick-and-dirty content strategy analysis; it was reassuring to discover that we’re more or less thinking along the right lines and on the right track in that regard.

Both virtual and in-person sprints have their pros and cons. Virtual sprints let people participate from anywhere without the need to travel and leave their normal lives and families behind. But in-person sprints give us the opportunity to have the kinds of conversations that work best when everyone’s in the same room together with a whiteboard. We had several of those conversations during this sprint in addition to documentation writing activities.

Conversations

Some of the whiteboard discussions we had during this sprint included:

We talked about the content and structure for the home page and global navigation of MDN. Expect to see these changes start to happen in the next few weeks!

A team met a couple of times to draft and refine a specification for the Localization Dashboard. This has been proposed as a Google Summer of Code project. Whether a student tackles this for GSoC or our own dev team builds it, having a spec is an important step.

We had a very long and engaging discussion about MDN’s page types and the elements they need. I will be turning our sketches and notes into a specification proposal this week.

We talked about our new process for managing documentation bugs by using the “Developer Documentation” component in Bugzilla along with Scrumbu.gs.

Documentation written

We also had lots of documentation written. I doubt this is an exhaustive list (in fact, I know that it isn’t), but it’s a list of what people specifically noted down that they worked on. Even as an incomplete list, this is a lot of great work. I’d like to thank everyone for their time and effort!

Aras Balali Moghaddam

Aras modified the following pages to make use of live code samples. We’re pretty excited about our live sample system, so getting more of them is always awesome!